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This is a repository copy of 'Off path, counter path’: contemporary walking collaborations in landscape, art and poetry. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/109131/ Version: Accepted Version Article: Tarlo, H and Tucker, J (2017) 'Off path, counter path’: contemporary walking collaborations in landscape, art and poetry. Critical Survey, 29 (1). pp. 105-132. ISSN 0011-1570 https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2017.290107 Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Harriet Tarlo and Judith Tucker ‘Off path, counter path’: contemporary walking collaborations in landscape, art and poetry Our title reflects our tendency as walkers and collaborators to wander off the established path through a series of negotiations and diversions. In this jointly-authored essay by a poet and an artist, we ask whether and how this companionable and artistic process might also be counter- cultural, as many anecdotal and theoretical enframings of walking practice throughout the centuries have suggested. If so, what culture are we walking and working against? A capitalist, resource-greedy one perhaps which takes little account of the immediate environmental crisis in which we find ourselves. Might walking and producing art together be more ‘counter’ to the culture than walking alone? Might we also be able to walk away from the idea that one art form is privileged to ‘speak’ above another, even to work across binaries within disciplines such as abstraction versus representation? Jeffrey Robinson in his suggestive, sometimes provocative, book, The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image argues that: ‘Fundamentally, I believe the walker is against dualism and divisions, Discrete steps exist on the walk.’i We shall test that idea here. We consider our walking inheritance from the Romantics, via Thoreau to mid-century painters and poets alongside a nexus of theories around walking and eco-criticism from the twentieth century thinker Michel de Certeau onwards What might we as twenty-first century walkers, artists and researchers wish to reject or take from these sources? We also consider what we might learn from our contemporaries, having discussed walking and collaboration with other artists and poets who work together including the poet Frances Presley working with the artist Irma Irsara and with fellow-poet Tilla Brading and the long-established walking poet Thomas A. Clark, working alongside artist, Laurie Clark.ii We touch on their work here. As practice-based researchers, we use our own work as a catalyst and research tool, referring to two of our place-based projects based in Northern England. 1 Figure 1. Excerpt from Tributaries: open-form poem by Harriet Tarlo and monochrome drawing by Judith Tucker Charcoal and pigment 61 x 76 cm. These are Tributaries (ongoing since 2011), based close to home on Black Hill, near Holmfirth in the South Pennines, and Excavations and Estuaries (ongoing since 2013), located a little further away, on the estuarial coastline, and Fitties Plotland, near Cleethorpes. Figure 2. No Through Road open-form poem by Harriet Tarlo and oil on canvas by Judith Tucker 61 cm x 183 cm. Both these places remind us that every exploration of a small ‘local’ area is of course steeped with wider-reaching aspects. Black Hill is now regarded as recreational semi- wilderness, but is a place haunted by industrial and farming history. Only traces remain of prior farms, mills and quarries. There are lanes and paths, now only used by walkers, which would have once been busy thoroughfares, and others which are faint tracks just discernible through the bracken. The coast between Cleethorpes and Tetney is a low, drained landscape where marsh, beach and farmland border on each other and, again, we find traces of past industry in the form of the remnants of the glory days of the Tetney-Louth canal. Like all localities then, these are changing places where human interventions and priorities intersect with the short and long-term, large and small scale non-human changes such as the recent re-shaping of land by water in tidal surges on the Humber. In conversation with other poet/artist collaborators we have found a variety of practice from illustration to ekphrasis. We ourselves steer away from illustration (where the poet writes and the artist later illustrates) or description (as in ekphrastic poems which describe artistic works) in favour of a more present-tense, inter-active collaboration. We found that much of the 2 difference lies in whether artists walk as well as work together. Both Clark and Presley have asked artists to illustrate their work, but both have also engaged in more inter-active collaboration. There are shades between. For their latest project, shown in In the Open, Cambridge, 2015 and in Frances Presley’s halse for hazel, Presley mostly walked alone, bringing back notes, poems, photographs and objects to Irsara who, in sometimes unexpected ways, responded with her own practice, for instance overlaying her drawing over Frances’ photo or using a branch that Frances had left at her house.iii More than illustrative, nonetheless the work was responsive. The actual walking with is integral to our work, not least because it opens us up to changing our own individual practice, in part because we are walking with a person from another discipline emerging from a different tradition. Referring back to Robinson’s ‘discrete steps’ against binaries, the practice of attending to the particular steers us away from stereotypical classifications of representational or abstract, Romantic or Modernist engagements with landscape, as does the final presentation of text and image in juxtaposition, of which more later. Figure 3. Tetney Blow Wells: open-form poem by Harriet Tarlo and oil on canvas by Judith Tucker 61 cm x 183 cm. Romantic-Modern origins Nonetheless Romanticism and Modernism form the crucible that shapes us in a process of shifting attachment, reassessment and resistance. British landscape poetry cannot help but define itself in relation to the Romantic poets, particularly in recent years when poets such as William Wordsworth and John Clare have been re-evaluated in ecocritical terms. It is no small thanks to Jonathan Bate, arguably the first British eco-critic, that the Romantics serve for us as Thoreau does for American ecocriticism.iv Bate returns us to Ruskin’s Wordsworth, the 3 wandering poet of nature, but we learn even more perhaps from the “new” Clare. While Clare’s ‘Journey out of Essex’ proves a tragic walking pattern, his earlier, close-to-the-ground poetry, with its biocentric approach to local birds and places and fierce opposition to enclosure, inspires many contemporary landscape poets. However one sticking point with 'Romanticism' (admittedly, the movement which most unravels when you try to grasp it) remains. This is the tenet identified by Hazlitt (the first Romantic critic) and many others subsequently, that walking is all about being in search of the inner self, of projecting what Wordsworth calls the ‘natural’ self onto the outer world so that it becomes a work of the Romantics’ own enormous transforming imaginations. Hazlitt himself, in ‘On Going on a Journey’, speaks of how walking outside stimulates his memory: I plunge into my past being, and revel there … and I begin to feel, think and be myself again.v It is internal, not external, stimulus that works for Hazlitt here and, crucially, he must be alone to achieve this. This is the main thrust of ‘On Going on a Journey’, and he later fondly but firmly berates Coleridge for his companionable chatty walking.vi Fundamentally, ‘in taking a solitary ramble … [t]he mind is its own place’.vii This is about as far as one can imagine from the collaborative walking out of and away from the self that we discourse upon here. Mid-century practices in art and poetry, walking and collaboration provide us with important diversions from Hazlitt’s journey and Wordsworth’s ego. In the interwar years modernism, walking, landscape and the open air were closely interlinked and rambling became increasingly popular. The geographer David Matlessviii and the English scholar Alexandra Harrisix share an interest in examining the mid-century phenomenon of trying to bring together the romantic and the modern in relation to locale. In Romantic Moderns Harris argues against Christopher Wilk’s assertion that Englishness and modernism were antithetical, arguing rather, that British artists were differently modern. Whilst in recent years, devotees of the neo- romantics may well have been conservative and backward looking, the artists themselves were neither. She draws on John Piper in particular to show that landscape was not the antithesis but the ally of abstraction. Recent reconsiderations of the neo-romantics by contemporary artists support this view. When George Shaw curated Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World he presented his work as open-ended and questioning. x Sutherland used walking as source inspiration: ‘It became my habit to walk through and soak myself in the country. I never forced myself here, or consciously looked for subjects’.xi Clare Woods’ recent show The Unquiet Head demonstrates her formal, colourist and conceptual reappraisal of Sutherland and Paul Nash.